Interesting comment from a reader on the Suburbia vs. Urbia post. She e-mailed this to me (which you can too at rod.dreher (at) gmail.com — this is what you’ll find out if you try to send something to my old Templeton address). I’ve edited it slightly to protect her privacy:

We live in a nice part of [city] because it was the best place we could find on short notice when my husband’s company transferred him here. It’s been a good place for us these past few years. It’s a short commute for my husband, and this is a really walkable urban neighborhood. When you’re a homeschooling mom, it’s nice to be able to take the kids out of the house a couple of times a day. I can’t say that we really have much community here, though. Our neighbors are nice enough, but our kids don’t go to the local school, so that puts us on the social margins of a lot of things. I have made it a priority to register my older kids for different sports, clubs, and other activities in the neighborhood, so they can have fun and get to know other kids. It has not been as successful as I would have liked, for a reason you and one or more of your readers have mentioned. It’s not the kind of thing I would want known publicly, so if you use this, please don’t mention my city.

To be blunt, I hate the way the other children around here behave. We live in a fairly affluent area, so it’s not a class issue, but even if it were, I would still … hate the way other children behave. These kids are rude and disrespectful to adults and each other, and their parents don’t seem to mind. I tried to overlook it, realizing that we are probably more strict in our household than most others, but it really gets to me. My husband and I don’t want our children socialized according to these values, and picking them up from their peer culture. Most of the kids around here are privileged and full of themselves. We have been blessed with material resources too, but we don’t want our children to grow up thinking that the behavior and sense of entitlement you see in their peers is the right way to be.

I am so grateful for the Christian homeschooling group we’re a part of. You had mentioned that your family is involved in a group like that. In our circle, families get together once a week so the kids can socialize, and it’s so great for them and us parents. If one of the parents fusses at the kids for acting too wild, all the other moms (and dads) will back them up. There is an unspoken understanding that we want to hold our kids to a higher standard. We have in our group white moms, Asian moms, black moms, and people all up and down the economic spectrum. We all have in common a shared Christian faith and a dedication to homeschooling. With those two things comes a whole culture, a whole set of cultural assumptions about the expectations we have of our children, and of ourselves as parents. This IS my community! We are diverse on non-essential things, but united on the things that matter most to us. We never talk politics, but I know some of the group are Republicans and some are Democrats. And that’s okay! The things that unite us are way more important … I’m talking about our shared faith and our dedication to the mission of raising and educating our kids together. I know I couldn’t do this without my community.

In my dreams, we would all live closer to each other, but that’s not possible. Lots of times I think about how when I was growing up, the standards of our homeschooling community are the standards that most people lived by in my  small town physical community. I don’t think that is true anymore, not even back home. It’s definitely not true where I live now. It just seems like things are breaking apart. This has challenged my communitarian ideals. Believe me, I want to be more a part of the community where my family actually lives, but I can’t let my children become acculturated to values and habits my husband and I find destructive. To be fair to my neighbors with kids, they probably wouldn’t want their children acculturated the the values and habits that we Christian homeschooling families live by either. I don’t think that means they are committed to being hostile to us, and I know we don’t feel hostile to them. It’s just that culture is a big deal when you’re raising kids, and I don’t believe we have the freedom to compromise when it comes to family. What is a community these days?

Thoughts, readers?